RAISING DUST. Encounters in Relational Geography

08.12.2010 - 20.02.2011

Calvert 22 Foundation, London / United Kingdom

It can be argued that the very idea of Europe is in itself a dislocation, a ‘nomadic horizon’ which responds differently to the shifting perspectives and desires of its inhabitants. Each artist in Raising Dust has contributed work which addresses this proposition and foregrounds the urgency of creating an autonomous ‘space for life’ that overrides dominant mainstream distinctions. Three of the artists (of Indian, Cypriot and British-Pakistani descent) have extended the encounter with Europe even further east so as to question our ideas of what comprises the presumed integrity of this continent....

A central symbol and point of departure for Raising Dust is the broom. Appignanesi was invited to write a text on this humble everyday household object in response to a collection of locally handmade brooms at the Arna-Jharna Museum in Rajasthan, India, which has devoted a three-year programme to document this down-to-earth but essential implement. The broom, by its very nature, positions its user – the weeper - in a constant routine battle against entropy, and at the same time paradoxically represents human endeavour and desolation, ingenuity and chaos. These conflicting forces of creation and destruction can be shown to have
shaped human destiny and brought us to our current crisis of natural resources. Appignanesi also drew parallels between the confrontation with the stubbornness of matter and our own detritus, typified by the his set in motion the genesis of an exhibition idea that would develop these thoughts further in the wider configurations of relational geography. The first version of this show, titled Dust, Ashes, Residua and featuring seven Eastern European artists, was presented at Open Space,
Zentrum fu¨r Kunstprojekte, Vienna, earlier in 2010.

For Raising Dust at Calvert 22, additional artists have joined the original participants in a response to the ‘broom’ text across a range of media. The broom remains as an emblem of basic human endurance in these artists’ reflections on waste and the geopolitical irregularities of Europe. Metaphorically it also represents a way of asserting that such issues cannot be swept under the carpet as it were, but need to be agitated, literally raising dust and watching how and where it settles.

[Source: http://www.calvert22.org/]